News

You have already read about the recording in Venice. Now that the work is finished, we can share a closer look at the whole process.

Motivation

The surveys were done near Jesolo – a famous seaside resort known for its abundant holiday facilities and a 15-kilometre (9 mi) beach called Lido di Jesolo. At the height of its touristic life, Jesolo hosts 6 million tourists per year. Traffic data in the area are fundamental.

ESSEOTTO Engineering was interested in a deep analysis in the field of road safety and road traffic on rural roads in Province of Venice. This first test concentrated on various types of intersections: T-intersection and a small roundabout. They didn’t want to only survey traffic (counting and classification) but also many other parameters such as: speeds, acceleration, time, distance and other parameters fundamental for road safety. Only DataFromSky is capable of helping them – there is no other way to collect all of this data comprehensively.

The places

Let’s take a look at the places of recording.

Small roundabout – Caposile

The first intersection is a typical Italian compact roundabout in front of the urban area. Here, interactions with other type of road users than just cars can take place. Since the speeds are lower than at other types of intersections, in this case the objects of study were roundabout angle deviation and trajectories arising from interaction with pedestrians.

T-intersection – Portegrandi

The second is a typical T-intersection between two rural roads: a primary road and a secondary road with a stop signal. The main issues are the speeds on the primary road and the conflict points on turn-left manoeuvres from primary road.

On-site operations

A date was selected and the engineers from TAU could finally come and do their thing – fly their blimp and record a video of the traffic. The recording was from height of 40-70 meters and gathered a total of 4.5 hours or 270 minutes of traffic footage for analysis.

The weather was very severe, and in fact a storm warning was issued for the day. The blimp rocked wildly in the winds, turning to and fro madly. Despite that, the recording could be stabilized in-software and used. The height to which the blimp was allowed to rise was limited by the weather, too. Fortunately, both of the sites were completely kept in view of the camera all the time, so there wasn’t any problem with processing.

Results

A lot of interesting data was gathered in a short space of time. Thanks to these surveys, ESSEOTTO Engineering is now able to analyse the infrastructure with more efficiency.

Road traffic and OD matrix

Thanks to the field of vision, granted by vantage point above the intersections, we are able to detect every vehicle and know its destination, with 100% accuracy.

A new concept of infrastructure design is growing – allowed by the rich data available with DataFromSky. Thanks to geometric parameters such as angle deviation, lane occupancy, speed profile and much more, a traffic engineer can carry out new designs with better accuracy and data firmly grounded in reality.

A new function was added to DataFromSky: Traffic flow visualization. Instead of collecting vehicle counts from manually defined combinations of gates, one can now get a fully automatically generated overview of the situation. Take a look at the pictures below to compare the old and new ways:

Normal view – a tangle of trajectories

New view – trajectories’ aggregation

What happens behind the scenes is that the trajectories are grouped according to their characteristics and the resulting trajectory groups visualized according to their average. Needless to say, the DataFromSky team is pleased to bring another of computer science concepts – clustering – into practical use in the field of traffic engineering.

Of course, the trajectory clustering is again only another stepping stone on which one can build further. Even the most rudimentary statistics inside the trajectory groups allow getting at more and more interesting kinds of information. Let’s say… Automatic detection of fastest path, extracting the associated speed, time spent in roundabout etc., comparison with the rest of the group,… As always, there is much space to grow and improve. As we all know – the sky’s the limit!

As the academic year is coming to its last weeks, the DataFromSky protégés which you already heard about will boost the team shortly. So look forward to more news of this kind, and if you have an idea for a function, type of data, that can be extracted from the currently available information, we are ready to listen!

The blimp visited three crossroads around Venice, recording from height of 40-70 meters a total of 4.5 hours or 270 minutes of traffic footage for analysis. The weather was somewhat disfavourable, with strong gusts of wind. The results turned out excellent, though.

TAU

TAU is a short for Trasporti e Ambiente Urbano s.r.l. The Milano-based company provides turn-key traffic analysis services, using its helium-filled balloons for recording video and DataFromSky as a subcontractor for processing and analysis.

Sky Eye Innovations

Sky Eye Innovations is a Swedish company based in Stockholm, focusing on production and renting of custom-built UAVs. They will offer video recording services and distribution of DataFromSky.